The Corporate Letdown

A chapter from Bite-Sized Creativity

This is a draft chapter from my upcoming book Bite-Sized Creativity. If you’d like to beta read and provide feedback, please let me know in the comments or reach out.

I flung open my laptop as soon as I woke up, excited to learn the bonus I would receive after six months of hard work. I was the top-performing reporter within my whole Asia-Pacific team. And I wasn’t just at any company. I was at a Fortune 500 company, a reputable financial publication. This bonus would be the beginning of an exponential pathway that would bring me to riches via a successful, comfortable corporate life.

I opened the attachment and stared at the number on the screen. It was an amount so paltry that I immediately called my manager to ask if it was missing a zero. I counted all the overtime hours I spent over the last six months, all the energy I expended, for a meager 1.5% bonus. 

Surely this can’t be real.

I had already done the impossible. I landed a job at an American company, which my mother always preached whenever we were stuck in the Jakarta traffic. She repeated my life script ad nauseam: Go to university abroad. Then, go work for an MNC abroad — that’s what we call multinational companies — to get good insurance and good pay. The best deal is if you get paid as an expat because then you can come back to Indonesia and still retain your salary in US dollars.

Graduating from one of the top 50 universities in the world was step one. Per my parents’ wishes, I obtained a business degree from a Hong Kong university and was ready to get myself into an MNC. I failed at my first attempt, having only received an offer from a local trade publication. I spent the next year applying for jobs in international publications until I secured a reporter role at a well-known American financial publication.

My parents were so proud of my new job. They were finally able to tell people where I worked and people would recognize the name. I spent three weeks at my parents’ place in Indonesia because I wouldn’t be able to visit them during my probation period. We’re technically allowed to take time off, but my parents said I’d leave a better impression if I worked through my first six months.

Then the world shut down.

Wearing an N95 mask I had packed from Indonesia — a scarce item in January 2020 — I started my first day as a reporter in an office that was vacated except for my editor and my bureau chief. Hong Kong had caught wind of a contagious, airborne virus spreading in the mainland and ordered the whole city to stop coming into the office. My editor had just joined the week prior, while the bureau chief was there to hand me my new laptop. We had a welcome lunch in an eerily quiet Thai restaurant and dispersed to go home right after, saying that we’ll be in touch via Skype.

Similar to many other young reporters, I was eager to prove myself. I combed business newsletters each morning, found out what happened overnight and pitched new stories to my editors at our biweekly 10 a.m. editorial calls. I packed my workdays with as many interviews and source chats as I could humanly churn into news articles. I stayed up late, took calls with US-based editors in hopes that they would promote me. I mean, surely they would. I published so often that I out-wrote the whole Hong Kong bureau. 

Meanwhile, I struggled to shut down after work hours ended. Since the pandemic obliterated social events, I didn’t know how to spend my free time. I instead just worked more. If I wasn’t replying to emails, I was reading Bloomberg News to buff up my expertise. Who even had hobbies in this economy? I killed them when I entered the workforce.

I would receive the first half of my bonus after six months. I was ready to receive my share of the American dream that my mother raised me on.

My editor did not have a strong comeback to my questioning the missing zero in my bonus. He just forced a smile and said, “It’ll get better once you reach the editor ranks.”

Upset at how little my time and energy was valued, I was determined to scale down and give my editors the absolute bare minimum. Their soft target for each reporter was two articles a week, so I delivered just that. I still tried my best to write them well, but I made sure to bank any extra interviews that have more of a shelf life till the next week.

From that point onwards, my job would be merely transactional and nothing more. When I joined, I agreed to trade 40 hours of my week using my skills and experience in exchange for a monthly salary. If they wanted more of my time and energy, they would need to pay extra. Since they weren’t, I mentally clocked out at 6 p.m. every day. 

I started filling in my free time with cooking. We weren’t buying so much takeout to keep ourselves safe and bought groceries once a week. The problem? I graduated with only two recipes in my repertoire (Shakshuka and a chicken stir-fry). There was only so much instant noodles our household could take.

YouTube became my new resource for meals, with chefs detailing not just the ingredients but they showed how to make the perfect scrambled egg and fold in the cheese. I diligently copied their steps, bringing gourmet recipes to our one-induction-stove kitchen: mapo tofu, nasi goreng, Hainanese chicken rice. I didn’t think I would enjoy cooking so much. Every mealtime, my girlfriend Jin would become more and more impressed with the dishes I was able to whip up.

After dinner, we would watch shows from the Netflix Covid canon, play Animal Crossing, and exercise on Ring Fit Adventure. I had more free time than I knew what to do with. I refused to do more work. I chose to watch Jin play The Last of Us II instead of writing another article I definitely had the capacity for. At one point I got so bored that I even picked up running.

At work, my editor noted that I had slowed down a bit. I made up some excuse of focusing more on quality than quantity but acknowledged his remark and said I’ll try to pick up my pace. I looked at the other reporters on my team and they’d often only write one article a week. I kept to my two-a-week target. I was doing the bare minimum, but I wasn’t going to fall short of the work I had promised to do for my company. However, I did not increase my output to compensate for my teammates either.

In my next performance review, I received a 1.5% bonus. It was the exact same amount for significantly less work. My manager told me that the baseline was 1%, so my reward for somehow still being the star performer of my team was 0.5%.

Doing the bare minimum resulted in the same amount of abysmal cash, and yet it gave me so much of my life back.

I wondered what I could do with all this extra time and energy.

Thank you for the feedback, Michael Dean, Matt Švarcs Richardson, and Justin Mather. Fun fact: Write of Passage editors looked at this chapter and came up with great beginning-ending combos for this essay. Thank you to those who shared their thoughts: CansaFis Foote, Michael Dean, Chris Wong, Karena, Alex Michael, Vidhika Bansal, Anna Archakova, Christin Chong, PhD, Emily Ann Hill, and Garrett Kincaid.

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Update log:

• 🦆 Saw the duck walk live. Anetra gave us a heart for wearing clip-on yellow ducks on our outfits. Note to self: I’m forever indebted to the friends that brought 40 ducks to Taipei for our group of 5.

• 📖 Started reading Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg (6% completed).

• 📕 Finished On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. I’ve been aware of his poetry but wow his prose leaves such a delicate impression.

• 🌈 Was paired with a baby gay for a mentorship programme to help prepare LGBTQ+ students enter the workspace. It’s my fourth year being a mentor.

• ✍🏼 Edited 18 essays in Write of Passage.

• 📽️ On the YouTube channel: Thoughts about sketching bigger than 3x5.

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